BBC and Sky journalists are again abandoning their pretense of impartial and balanced news coverage by expressing their rage at the democratic vote of the Church of England against legislation to allow the consecration of women bishops.

A Sky journalist has just concluded his news report by scornfully saying that tonight’s vote against women bishops shows the Church of England is stuck in the ‘Dark Ages’. And a BBC journalist concludes that the vote shows that the Church of England is ‘irrelevant’ to the UK.

Campaigners for women bishops also attacked the democratic voting system that rejected their proposal.

The Rev Rachel Weir, of the campaign group Women and the Church, said, ‘We’ve spent 10 years working for this legislation.There’s something badly wrong with the system. ‘In the General Synod we have a grossly over-representational number of extremely conservative wings of the Church. ‘They’re not representational views from the pews, the majority of people would love to have women bishops.’

Christina Rees, a campaigner for women bishops, said the result was a ‘disaster’.

’74% of the Synod said yes but it had to have a two thirds majority in each house – it only failed in the House of Laity. ‘I think it’s a betrayal of trust in the wider Church.’

Now, imagine if the vote had gone the way the campaigners, and their supporters at BBC and Sky, wanted. No doubt then they’d be praising the democratic system, saying the vote represented the will of the people and was guided by the Holy Spirit.

Journalists in the media and liberal campaigners put ‘democracy’ on a pedestal when they think they can manipulate and influence voters to express their will to power, but when any electorate rejects their ideology they cry ‘foul’, there must be a re-count, there must be another referendum, until they get the result they demand.

Neither the BBC nor Sky nor the campaigners are considering the possibility that the reason why the vote went against them was because members of the laity weren’t convinced by their arguments from Scripture and pressure from the media to allow women bishops. Well done to those members of the laity who had the courage of their convictions.

But supporters of women bishops are already threatening moves to by-pass the democratic decision of Synod. The Daily Telegraph reports:

‘There will now almost certainly be calls in Parliament for the Church of England’s exemption from equality legislation — effectively allowing it to discriminate against women by barring them from becoming bishops — to be removed, opening the way for women to bring a legal challenge. If successful, it could lead to women becoming bishops without any of the arranged safeguards for traditionalists agreed by Synod.’

Ben Bradshaw, a former Labour minister, said: “This means the Church is being held hostage by an unholy and unrepresentative alliance of conservative evangelicals and conservative Catholics. This will add to clamour for disestablishment, there is even talk of moves in Parliament to remove the Church’s exemption from the Equality Act.”

Protect the Pope comment: The same sense of rage at the democratic decision of the Church of England was expressed by former Labour Home Secretary Jacqui Smith who posted on Twitter : ‘Sick of waiting for the established church to come in line with every other major inst. Disestablish – they don’t represent my country.’ It’s at times like these that we see the real face of some politicians. We can conclude from this that this senior Labour politician doesn’t consider the Catholic Church a ‘major institution’ in this country’, with our thousands of schools, and our millions of voters.

The threats to remove the Church of England’s exemption under the Equalities legislation is a warning to all Christian churches that if we don’t conform to the will of those who seek to be our secular masters then they will use their power in Westminster to coerce and punish us.

The day may come when police frog-march a Catholic bishop into his own cathedral, force his hands onto the head of a woman and make him speak the words of ordination to the priesthood. But they can’t force Catholics to attend her “Mass”.

The vote in the Church of England Synod was very good news. I am a convert from the Anglican church and have watched with sadness the degradation of that Church with its pillaging of its liturgy, especially the Book of Common Prayer and its ridiculous a la carte Eucharist.
Priestesses are just the latest in a series of innovations that have torn apart a once loved and respected church.
Let’s hope that this vote avoids the ultimate schism that looms for the Church of England.

I am actually rather hopeful for the C of E. They demographic is shifting towards younger, more urban more evangelical christians (contrast the churches that are dying with the ones that are growing).

They tend to be less liberal on things like women bishops. They are less traditional in things like form of worship but actually theologically they are closer to Rome than some Anglican. But – and this is why I am optimistic for them- they regard evagelisation as their priority and I think that they are less likely therefore to get side-tracked with the kind of hair-splitting internal squabling and lack of respect for those with differing opinions which have damaged the C of E and the RCC in recent times.

I find it unbelievable that the C of E think they have a power to vote and change divine law. It is so strange to me. If C of E think women Bishops would increase members they need to think again. When they insituted women priests did that grow adherenace? Did liberalising views on homoseuxuality increase adherence? No. The Church should be in the world but not of the world. Adapting teaching to fit the views of society around is a mistake and it does not work because liberal denominations are losing members while traditionalist Churches are gaining

“I find it unbelievable that the C of E think they have a power to vote and change divine law. It is so strange to me”

to be fair to the C of E. They are not just voting on a whim. All of them will have thought long and hard and will have prayed to God to provide them with guidance. I don’t think that you would deny that Anglicans are capable of being guided by God though prayer. Would you?

Well I’m not interested in navel-gazing either Eric. Since coming back from Maryknoll I did find the Church in England too inward looking. However tradition and doctrine are important, but we need to understand the dynamics of neo-liberalism and consumerism in giving rise to New Age and feminist movem,ents, and particularly in undermining all traditions and cultures across the globe, a fact that is all too well known.
Marketisation has uprooted us all, and, would you believe it, in the name of ‘freedom! Serfdom more like!!

Well the evangelicals I know have a very robust approach of “let’s bring people to Christ and we can sort out the minor details later”. Even issues like gay marriage and women priests are minor issues to their minds. I agree with them all the way, but it is an approach you have to respect because it is working because Evangelicals are the only part of the C of E which is growing.

Yes Karla, I find your comments always precise and wise.
The view advanced by the British Bullshitting Corporation in its report on the Church of England’s Synodal decision to reject episcopal priestesses, included comment about the new Archbishop Welby having had experience in industry as a member of Shell, that incomparable doyen of environmental degradation!
Justin Welby is an evangelical with executive experience in a large Transnational Corporation,
a business whose capitalised value exceeds the revenue of the British State. The last Anglican archbishop to lead the Church of England was Archbishop Carey, another evangelical.
Professor Richard Roberts writing of the introduction and embedding of managerial practices in the Anglican Church writes:
‘Dr. George Carey…….(in 1991)prominently advocated the implementation of managerial
practices and schemes of appraisal that would enhance ministerial ‘performance’ and
incidentally secure closer control of clerical ideology in what amounted to an
ecclesiastical ‘neo-Fordism”. Part of extending the right-wing enterprise culture
into the Church of England was ‘A self-conscious search for the charismatic
super-performer,is to be found at the very core of the enterprise culture’
Under Carey the right-wing Corporate ideology controlled and directed by managerial elites
entered the Church of England and this condition viz. the managerialisation of the Church
was accomplished in the Turnbull Report and a second publication Working as One Body.
Behind the move for women bishops and priestesses is the drive by the bishops to engineer
this entrepreneurial ideology into the priesthood. The equalitarian movement in the British
State is one arm of the total transformation of culture towards the ‘sovietisation of a managed, rather than an actively democratic, Britain’.(Richard Roberts: ‘Ruling the Body: the care of souls in a managerial church in Religion, Theology and the Human Sciences (2002)
If we take Edward Norman’s argument to heart we must conclude that the episcopal elite
in the Church of England which has in the past almost invariably tended to absorb and transmit the dominant ideology of its peer group, will render the Anglican Church congruent with the prevailing ideology of the New elites. ‘Women priests’ are one managed outcome of this
‘trahison de clercs’.

Being not exactly a wall flower type of woman, working in a male dominated industry, I can tell you that many professional women are rather turned off by the idea of a forced ‘women’s quota’ in corporations.

Many women are also turned off by feminist theology and the common fairy tale that women have no authority in the RCC.
Strangely you will find that confident women, well grounded in faith, have NO problems with a purely male Priesthood.
I don’t!
Generally, women feel quite superior to men anyway… at least on this side of the channel – which presents quite a problem for society – but that’s a different topic.

I do think that the CoE is not being consistent. If you allow female ‘Priests’, you have to open all offices to them. Keeping them on a certain level is worse than keeping them out.

I don’t know that Jacqui Smith is any longer a senior Labour politician. The voters of Redditch gave her the boot at the last General Election. Apparently she now co-hosts a weekly show on a talk radio station.
But she’s right about dis-establishing the CofE. The sooner the CofE gets rid of the need to satisfy politicians the better.
Ben Bradshaw’s “even talk of moves in Parliament to remove the Church’s exemption from the Equality Act” is just bluster. He doesn’t even say that there are moves in Parliament. He just says there’s ‘talk’ of moves. What kind of gibberish is that?

I have just watched the debate in the House of Commons on the failed election for episcopal priestesses at the C of E Synod! After a nauseatingly descriptive account of the voting process
by a (nameless) Tory with a pink shirt and rosy cheeks, one Diana Johnson of New Labour commented that the C of E was not being MODERNIZED quickly enough, a slogan favoured by globalizing neo-liberal tyrants for imposing the market on all cultures and traditions throughout the globe! This modernization, a process for transforming all institutions engineered from the top down, was echoed by the late lamented Rowan Williams who told the House of (treacherous) Clergy that the rest of society would be dismayed by the Synod’s decision, in other words the managerial culture that now engineers the secular transformation of the Anglican Church would look farcical.
Now we can all see the trap into which a Constitutionally embedded Church has fallen. No longer will Anglicans be witnessers of the Gospel but will follow Henry V111 into an adulterous relationship with the British Establishment! How ironic!
If I were an Anglo-Catholic now, I would be packing my bags for Rome like so many before. I
cannot see the C of E disestablishing under Archbishop Welby. What we are likely to see under Welby is the managerialised Church coming out into the open!
Any future ARCIC relations with the C of E look dubious in the extreme! Let’s hope Cardinal Vincent Nichols doesn’t start sleeping with the CBI and the corrupt Westminster cadre!

I regret that Sky reports unfairly of the Church in the UK. ( Even though in this case it’s about the Church of England)
Because conversely Italy’s SkyTg24 Rome-based news channel- Italian equivalent of SkyNews , is very fair in its reporting of Catholicism. Every Sunday SkyTg24 broadcasts the Pope’s Angelus ( which is also broadcast live by Rai1 and the Catholic broadcaster tv2000 ) , which is commented by the very good and fair SkyItalia’s Vaticanist Stefano Maria Paci. When Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini died and many in the Italian media tryed to confuse his death, hinting at the fact that , in refusing futile medicale care, he was in contrast with the Church’s teaching ( in their attempt to depict him as opposed to the Church), Sky’s Vaticanist read live from the Catholic Church’s Cathechism which says that the Church is in fact against futile medicale care, so there was no contradiction whatsoever in Cardinal Martini’s refusal of it.
In this sense Italy’s SkyNews is opposed to the other main Italian all-news channel ,the RAI’s RaiNews24 , which is often somewhat hostile to and biased of the Church